Melancholia and its theopolitical discontents

Gillian Rose’s and Daniel Bensaïd’s debates on Benjamin’s messianism

Authors

• Rachel Pafe Goethe University of Frankfurt https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5699-8805

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30752/nj.154730

Abstract

English-born philosopher and sociologist Gillian Rose (1947-1995) and French Trotskyist activist and philosopher Daniel Bensaïd (1946-2010) were born a mere year apart. While their work departs from the respective strands of Western Marxism and its focus on aesthetics and philosophy versus a Trotskyist preoccupation with economics and politics, they both were interested in Walter Benjamin and his ideas of messianism, melancholy, and Judaism in the early nineties. This article argues that Rose and Bensaïd’s heterodox Jewish identities in their respective memoirs parallel their Jewish-inflected dialectical containers for Benjamin’s melancholy. It effectively stages imagined fictive meeting between the two thinkers in which they discuss their disagreements about Benjamin as melancholically politically disengaged (Rose) or revitalizing Marxism through a melancholy messianic wager (Bensaïd).